How to build a guardian farm in Minecraft

Guardians are Minecraft's elusive but incredibly useful mobs due to the resources they drop, including Prismarine Shards, Prismarine Crystals, and even some extra fish for good measure.

Like many hostile mobs in Minecraft, guardians can be farmed for their loot drops, allowing Minecraft players to receive bunches of Prismarine materials with little to no effort once the farm is in working order. The toughest part of building a guardian farm, in particular, is finding the ocean monument where the guardians reside.

Guardian farms will take a sizable amount of resources. Still, the payoffs are well worth the investment as players will receive plenty of benefits from the farm and can come back to collect from it at fairly frequent regularity.

---

Minecraft: Ways to create a guardian farm

Players have options on how they'd like to construct their farm to best suit their needs (Image via Mojang)

New ways to develop guardian farms in Minecraft are always coming through the grapevine, and there may be no perfect or most efficient means to farm guardians. Because of this, players have options on how they'd like to construct their farm to best suit their needs.

To build their farm, players should take some things into account:

• Once they find the ocean monument in their Minecraft world, it is often a wise idea to drain the area of water. Sponges are incredibly helpful at achieving this, as they can line the ceilings, floors, and walls of the monument in order to drain the water from the inside of the monument.
• Users can also attain this after all elder guardians are dead. They can fill the room with instant-breakable blocks such as slime, honey, or TNT.

Once Minecraft gamers have cleared out the inside, they can begin working on clearing out the outside of the monument. There are a few ways to accomplish this:

• Building a wall around the entire ocean monument, which would take approximately 87 full stacks to accomplish. Once the perimeter is finished, players would fill the interior with sand or gravel.
• Build the same wall as above, but fill the interior with sponges to remove the water.
• Build a ring, fill the inside with lava to turn a layer of water into stone. Drop the ring down lower, and mine out the cobblestone created, then rinse and repeat.
• Build the previous wall but fill the inside with flammable materials such as wood planks, then light them on fire to clear out the inside.
• Build a ceiling, use the Frost Walker enchantment to make the water into ice, and mine the ice to remove it.

Once gamers have cleared out the area inside and around the monument, they can build their guardian farm in earnest. A typical such creation in Minecraft requires a spawning area, a killing area, an item collection area, and a place where players can wait.

This can be done simply and in a few steps:

1. For the spawning area, they can create a layer of signs placed under a pool of water that is only a few blocks deep at most. This sees guardians spawn and fall off the surface of the signs and out of the water. Players may accelerate this by using flowing water to help push the guardians out if they'd like. Bubble columns pointing downward can also be helpful, but these are more complex designs.
2. For a killing area, the easiest design is to place a large room below the spawning pool for the guardians to fall into. However, this particular method won't work well with flowing water as guardians have pathing abilities that allow them to swim against water currents. For manual guardian farms, gamers will need some source of healing as attacking guardians damages them with thorn damage if players use melee weapons. Since ranged weapons are too slow for efficient farming, they can try to place a beacon to allow regeneration.
3. Users have plenty of leeway when it comes to the collection and waiting areas. The ideal collection system for a manual farm involves hoppers to funnel the guardians' loot drops into a chest or even a minecart with a hopper. There are few requirements for a waiting area, as it is simply a spot for players to pass the time in. In all reality, collecting the guardian's items is up to the player after killing the mobs themselves.

There are several more methods in the current version of Minecraft with more complexity. These include the "Guardian Drop" farm, the "No Drain" farm after update 1.13, the "Iron Golem" guardian farm, and the "OP" guardian farm, which is staggeringly complex and resource-heavy in Survival Mode but allows for up to 100,000 drops per hour.

The farm that players choose to work with is up to them, but a basic manual for kill farm in Minecraft is a great starting point before refining things and diving into a more automated or complicated design.

---